MJ (20 page)

Michael, Enrico had heard, was reluctant. His celebrity friends, including Elizabeth Taylor, Paul McCartney, and Jane Fonda, advised him against overexposure: “You shouldn’t do commercials until you’re on the downside of your career.” The other Jacksons were no more enthusiastic. A source recalls
King’s attorney chasing Jackie Jackson around the house, waving the contract, demanding that he sign. But King was vehement. It wasn’t until the Pepsi people showed up at Hayvenhurst with storyboards for TV commercials that the brothers became intrigued.

Enrico spent weeks sparring with King over a deal. That year, Coke had spent
$4 million sponsoring the Olympics. That gave King leverage. Pepsi offered the Jacksons
$5 million, the most any celebrity had ever received for a tour sponsorship deal. Enrico and his right-hand advertising man, Alan M. Pottasch, told King the only way Pepsi would consider such a gigantic deal was if Michael agreed to film two TV commercials. King and Joe Jackson accepted quickly. But Michael had conditions. He refused to touch a can of Pepsi—wouldn’t hold one, wouldn’t take a sip from one.
“You can shoot my feet,” Michael said. “You can shoot my shadow. You can shoot my elbows. You can shoot anything but my face—I don’t want it in for more than two seconds.”

As Pepsi made plans to start filming the Jackson commercial, King
tried to take over the tour. On November 30, 1983, King called a press conference at Tavern on the Green, the New York City restaurant that had long symbolized affluence or, at least, high-end date nights. The Jacksons strolled in, wearing matching aviator sunglasses, and Michael made one of his first appearances in the decorated,
military-style uniform that had vague echoes of George Washington. Michael didn’t say much, except to introduce his sisters and mother. Marlon managed to squeeze in the name of the tour: Victory, which was a victory unto itself, because Michael had wanted to call it “the Final Curtain.”
“Before the Victory tour, which was a great tour, got underway,” Marlon would say, “it was already the most painful tour we’d ever done.”

Michael began to call Roger Enrico regularly about the Pepsi commercial. He was polite, always.
“Just very quiet but very determined,” Enrico says. One time, he called back twenty minutes after a long conversation and said, “This is Michael Jackson—the person you spoke to earlier?”
That
Michael Jackson?
Enrico thought to himself. When the Pepsi people went to the Jacksons’ house to show them the storyboards, Michael decided he didn’t like the music the in-house writers had come up with. “What do you suggest?” Enrico asked, worried this would be yet another potential deal-killing snag. “Why don’t you use ‘Billie Jean’?” Jackson said, “and I’ll change the words?”
I dunno
, Enrico said to himself, silently thrilled.
I have to think about that.

To record a new version of “Billie Jean” for the Pepsi commercial, Michael showed up to the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on the evening of January 27, 1984. His brothers had been rehearsing since nine
A.M.
, with Tito standing in for Michael. At 6:30
P.M.
, they were ready to film. (Before that, there was a moment of panic when Michael dropped his famous white glove in the toilet and shrieked for help; Bob Giraldi, the commercial’s director, asked the crew to fetch a hanger, but Michael said,
“Oh, forget it,” and fished it out himself.) Michael was wearing his
Motown 25
outfit—black sequined jacket, white shirt, short black slacks, black shoes. Giraldi called for the first take. Three
thousand fans were in the auditorium, and they’d spent the day chanting, “Jacksons! Jacksons!” Michael strode down the steps onstage and sang the soft-drink lyrics he’d modified to go with the
boom-bap
of “Billie Jean”: “You’re a whole new generation / you’re loving what you do / put a Pepsi into motion / that’s all you’ve gotta do.” The lighting guys pulled open the light pods, on cue, for five takes in a row, and the pyro exploded on schedule.
“I want more!” Giraldi kept saying. “Why?” the lighting men wondered to themselves. Giraldi sought a three-dimensional effect, with explosions circulating around the stage. Michael stood at the epicenter of this pyrotechnical power.

On the sixth take, as Michael went down the stairs, his hair seemed to spontaneously combust. “Because of the stuff he had in his hair, it just ignited,” recalls Reed Glick, who was on the lighting crew. “He was literally standing in a ball of flames.” Michael somehow continued his routine. But then he shouted, “Tito! Tito!” Whether he was unaware, trying to put it out with the force of his movements, acting on instinct, or in shock, Michael began to spin around. Finally, several crew members caught up to him, security man Miko Brando first, knocking him to the floor as they snuffed out the flame. When Michael finally came up again, he had a red-orange bald spot on top of his head.

Afterward, as the paramedics arrived to take Michael to the hospital, he motioned to his assistant, Nelson P. Hayes, who had been on the set.
“Get my glove, Nelson,” Michael said. Hayes glimpsed the bubbly burn on
MJ’s scalp, even though Michael’s head was covered in tape and bandages, and he was strapped to an ambulance stretcher outside the Shrine. Nelson gave the glove to Michael, who put it on. He waved weakly, a gesture dutifully captured by cameras. The image demonstrated Michael’s show-must-go-on perseverance. But it didn’t take long for the tough part to set in. “When they started skin grafts and stuff, that had to be painful,” Hayes recalls. “He had to go through burn reconstruction.”

The ambulance took Michael to the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai Hospital, where his plastic surgeon, Steven Hoefflin, noted he was
“quite
shaken up” with a
“palmed-sized area” of second- and third-degree burns and “surrounding burned and singed hair.” Joe, Katherine, and Randy accompanied him later as he was switched to the Brotman Burn Center and given warm blankets. He took a
sleeping pill but refused a painkiller. (Six years later, MJ’s friend Buz Kohan and a TV producer, George Schlatter, visited one of his studios to convince him to appear on a televised sixtieth-anniversary tribute to Sammy Davis Jr. Michael led Schlatter and Kohan to a men’s room and placed their hands on top of his head.
“You feel that?” he asked. “Those are balloons under my scalp. When my head was burned, in order to save my scalp, they had to cut away the dead tissue, put these balloons in there, and stitch it together. I am in such pain, you can’t imagine.”) By all accounts, MJ had never consumed drugs of any kind, even when he was hanging out at Studio 54 in the seventies or working at LA recording studios in the coke-fueled eighties. But sometime after he left
the hospital, he began to take painkillers.

John Branca called Pepsi’s Enrico and told him of Jackson’s intention to sue. Enrico reminded him that it was director Bob Giraldi’s company that caused the problem, not Pepsi. Branca said he’d sue for pain, suffering, and loss of income. Enrico responded that loss of income would never hold up in court—Walter Yetnikoff of CBS Records had told him the publicity boost from the incident doubled
Thriller
album sales. The story had been in newspapers and tabloids for weeks. Even President Reagan had sent a letter expressing sympathy.
“You don’t understand,” Branca said. “He doesn’t want the money for himself. He’s going to donate the money.” Enrico proposed a deal to join Jackson in a donation, and Branca accepted. Pepsi wound up paying $1.5 million, used to establish the Michael Jackson Burn Center in Los Angeles.

*  *  *

Michael Jackson watched the
Entertainment Tonight
footage from the Victory tour press conference at Tavern on the Green in his bedroom. He’d cringed through Don King’s grandstanding at the time, but he
didn’t realize until viewing it later how bad it was. Exasperated, he called a
meeting with Randy, Jackie, Tito, and Marlon (but not Jermaine, Katherine, or Joe, who were King’s allies), as well as attorneys
Paterno and Branca and accountant Fred Moultrie. Michael repeated the
Entertainment Tonight
footage.
“I’m done,” he said when the lights came up. “I’m not touring with Don King. If you guys want to go on tour, that’s fine. But I’m not going.” He left the room. Everybody was silent. The brothers looked at the floor. Two minutes later, Michael flew back into the room. “I came back,” he said, “because I want you to know that I’m
serious.
” He left again and slammed the door.

King didn’t leave without a fight:
“If you want to take this tour away from me, you’ll have to pay me,” he said. They did, and he received
3 percent of tour profits.

The Jacksons replaced King with
Chuck Sullivan, an associate at a Wall Street law firm. At forty-one, Chuck was white and balding, with thick eyebrows and a stiff chin. He was the son of Billy Sullivan, founder of the NFL’s New England Patriots. An executive for the team, he’d booked David Bowie and the Police at Sullivan Stadium and saw concerts as an important revenue source after the 1982 players’ strike.

Sullivan signed a deal to give the Jacksons $41 million—roughly
$12 million up front, the rest promised within two weeks of the first show. He had to borrow the money, and he put up
61,000-seat
Sullivan Stadium as collateral, for which he took out another mortgage. Sullivan gave the Jacksons
roughly 83 percent of the ticket revenue and took about 17 percent for himself. If Victory tickets sold $55 million, which would have amounted to roughly thirty-five sold-out stadiums at $31 per ticket, Sullivan would have walked away with $10 million. But conditions on the Victory tour were far from perfect. The traveling
personnel, in addition to the Jacksons and their families, numbered 250, from the riggers who hung a
kitchen sink
^IV
in the rafters to an ambiance
supervisor, Douglas Lyon, who provided what the
Los Angeles Times
called
“ice sculptures, fuchsias, potted palms and other homey touches in the three-room backstage parlor where the brothers begin and finish their concert evenings.” The parlor furnishings cost $40,000. The Jacksons’ attorneys, led by Branca, drew up a forty-five-page contract for Sullivan, plus twenty pages of attachments. The contract itself cost $196,500. Insurance premiums cost $500,000.

Michael Jackson may not have wanted this tour, but the stagecraft would be his personal canvas. At one early meeting at designer Bob Gurr’s facility in Ventura, California, Michael and security man Bill Bray arrived in a Rolls-Royce. Michael sketched his visions on a whiteboard. He wanted a spiderlike apparatus with a giant light source in the middle. Trying to put together MJ’s wish list under a deadline, designers had to assemble huge pieces of stage on the fly. Not all of Michael’s ideas were good.
“Michael came up with the idea of having a tiger onstage,” says a source close to the tour. Production people procured the tiger at great expense, but when it showed up and urinated on the set during rehearsal, the tour’s production and financial people were able to talk Michael out of it.

Michael’s vision was complicated, but he’d hired the best stage designers. They loaded the set with a complex set of hydraulic elevators, which used fluid to push portions of the stage up and down throughout the show. It fell to Nick Luysterborghs, the head carpenter, who had some experience with
hydraulics, to make sure all the pressurizing fluid was filled to capacity and the backup systems were ready to prevent even the minutest technical failure.
“We did fifty-five shows,” recalls Luysterborghs, who worked under the stage during every show with a small crew known as the Mole Patrol. “And I made fifty-five deals with God.”

Michael wanted so many lights throughout the set, walls of them stacked on the rear and sides, including super-bright shopping-mall searchlights, or “sky-trackers,” that the crew had to design a traveling power source—common with concerts today but unprecedented in 1984.
“There was a whole system of engineering and logistical firsts,”
recalls Robert A. Roth, one of Victory’s lighting designers. The crew had to hang
fifty-six thousand pounds of lights on the roof above the stage and stack the giant amplifiers on scaffolding structures on either side—draped with hand-painted designs because
Michael didn’t want to see the actual amplifiers.
“He struck me as sort of a kid with an unlimited allowance that could buy anything he wanted. And these were all like big, expensive toys,” says Steve Jander, whose company Showlasers handled some of the most spectacular effects, including the one where Randy Jackson vanquishes a group of evil, Muppet-like “Kreetons” (one played by Michael’s assistant Nelson Hayes) with a green laser sword during the opening sequence. The set was so big, and so complex, that its crew members published their own newspaper: the
Jacksonville Picayune,
full of inside jokes and intelligence about where the best shows and bars were in a given city.

Rehearsals began June 26, 1984. Michael asserted himself with his typical attention to detail. During an early take of “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” Michael abruptly stopped the band and explained that he needed a certain kind of sound so he could get the dance steps exactly right. He restarted the band. “That’s not it,” he said. “It’s got to be big, really big, right there.” They worked on that note over and over, so all nine musicians could hit it with what one writer later called
“the power of a fifty-piece orchestra.” All the Jacksons had their say—Tito tinkered with a guitar harmony and Jackie wanted more punch in the drums—and it sometimes took them hours to get everything right. Even after that, Michael insisted they repeat the song to perfection. Often they’d rehearse till one
A.M.
, then return to the studio at seven
A.M.
the next day.

After three months of grueling rehearsals, the Jacksons and band moved their rigs to a huge soundstage in Birmingham, Alabama, where they convened with the rest of the crew.
“It was like NFL training camp. It was serious business. You had to be prepared,” says Gregg Wright, one of the tour’s lead guitarists. “All the crew people—rigging,
light, laser people, mechanical people, guitar techs—ran through this whole show. We did that seven days a week, fifteen-hour days, for a month. Just labor-intensive.” On the van rides between Birmingham’s downtown Hyatt Regency and the soundstage, eleven-year-old kids who knew Michael Jackson was in town put on flawless, impromptu
moonwalking displays as the entourage drove by.